Tracy Borman on the real Tudors
Interview: Tracy Borman
The historian and author on bringing the larger-than-life tales of the Tudors to the stage…
If you’ve ever wandered the halls of Hampton Court and wondered what really happened behind its tapestry-clad walls, Tudors on Tour promises some revelations.
Bestselling author, historian and broadcaster Professor Tracy Borman OBE is bringing her “favourite” dynasty to life in a series of shows, with dates in Epsom and Guildford this autumn.
“It’s like Horrible Histories for grown-ups,” Tracy laughs. “The show takes the audience behind closed doors to look at the Tudors as they really were when stripped of all their finery.”
The Tudors provide rich material, and five centuries on, the fascination with their stories continues. “I think they were so charismatic, and that charisma hasn’t really faded in 500 years,” says Tracy.
Anne Boleyn, for example, remains one of the most compelling figures of the Tudor age. Her relationship with Henry VIII changed the course of English history, helping to trigger the king’s break with the Roman Catholic Church and the English Reformation. “She was a very clever, feisty woman,” says Tracy.
Yet she is also a woman whose reputation has been shaped by centuries of myth. Anne was sometimes portrayed as a witch who had bewitched Henry into marrying her. There was also the enduring claim that she had six fingers on one hand. Most damaging of all was the accusation that she was an adulteress. “Thomas Cromwell built a flimsy case, but it was enough to destroy her,” says Tracy. “She’s been depicted as this scarlet woman, but actually there’s nothing to back that up whatsoever.”
Instead, Tracy believes Anne was a deeply virtuous woman with quite radical ideas about religion and social reform. “She wanted to make a difference as queen, but ultimately she was judged by her failure to give Henry the son that he so craved.”
And Henry himself, says Tracy, was very different away from the public stage. “He was extraordinarily self-confident, borderline tyrannical. But one visitor to his private apartment described him as being the most timid man you could hope to meet, and this is because he was absolutely paranoid about sickness. He was a massive hypochondriac and in constant fear of getting ill or of his family getting ill.”
Henry’s children, too, can look rather different once the royal finery is stripped away. His daughter Mary is often remembered as stern and intensely pious, but Tracy says there was another side to her personality.
“She’s portrayed as being very pious and sober-minded, but she was quite a party girl in private and always throwing these lavish evenings of drinking and entertainment.”
Then there was Edward VI, who died at just 15. “Edward is portrayed as being a sickly child because he dies young,” says Tracy. “But he was incredibly robust and great at sports. He was very intelligent, but had all the makings of being a much greater tyrant than his father. He was very determined to stamp the new Protestant religion on England and was writing essays about how evil the Pope was.”
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Tracy’s fascination with the Tudor world has inspired several books, both fiction and non-fiction. Her latest, The House of Boleyn, explores the rise and fall of one of the most famous families of the period. “I spent a lot of time with the Boleyns in the course of my career and, as a historian, I got to know that story so well,” she says. “But even though they are such a famous family, there are so many gaps in our knowledge because of what happened to them. Henry really tried to wipe them from history.”
One place where the Boleyn story survives is their beautiful Kent home, Hever Castle. Tracy chose it as the setting for the entire novel, using fiction to explore the parts of their lives that history has left undocumented.
“I wanted to set the story entirely there and really show the Boleyns as they were,” she explains. “I think this novel enabled me to fill those gaps that history has left behind and give Anne a voice – what did she actually think about Henry, did she love him, did she actually want to be queen? There are assumptions made about her and actually we don’t know. So it was just too tempting a prospect to be able to use my imagination to tell the Boleyn story from their perspective.”
That includes challenging the familiar idea that Anne deliberately manipulated Henry. “She’s often portrayed as playing Henry like an instrument until he’d agreed that he was going to marry her. And actually there’s no evidence she wanted to marry Henry or be queen, and there’s certainly no evidence her father Thomas wanted that for his precious daughter. He’d already had one daughter, Mary, ruined by having been Henry’s mistress.”
The Boleyns were undoubtedly politically ambitious, Tracy says, and ambition came with a price in the Tudor court. “But really it’s just a tragedy that the downfall of this brilliantly gifted family was the twist of fate that was miscarriages and the inability to give Henry a son.”
Tracy stays close to historical fact in her novel but makes it clear in her author’s note which elements come from her imagination. The servants’ stories in particular are fictional. “We know hardly anything about the servants, so I was able to make them up and create different plots around them.”
Her hope is that the book brings to light the human element behind this ultimately tragic tale. “There’s the well-known rhyme about Henry’s wives – divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived – it almost normalises it, but there are real people behind the rhyme.”
That is particularly poignant at Hampton Court Palace, where Tracy works as Chief Historian at Historic Royal Palaces. Jane Seymour gave birth to the future Edward VI there and died just 12 days later.
And the Tudor connections extend far beyond Hampton Court. Living locally in south-west London, Tracy says she loves how rich the surrounding area is in Tudor history, from the remnants of Nonsuch Palace to Richmond Palace. So, if she could bring one Tudor back for a day, who would it be – and where would she take them? “It would have to be Elizabeth I. She loved this part of the world, and she died at Richmond Palace, a favourite palace of hers. I’d love to just have a little conversation with Elizabeth. Ask her if she really was the Virgin Queen – although I don’t think I’d dare!”
On stage around the UK
Epsom Playhouse
20 October
Guildford
25 October
Image credit: Hodder & Stoughton
